SmartJobBoard Blog

We’ve finally and proudly released SmartJobBoard v 2.2! Considering lots of suggestions from our current and prospective clients we’ve included the most requested functions and improvements. In contrast to previous releases, which were tested only by our own means, version 2.2 was also tested by our customers in real working environment.

In this post I’d like to outline only the most important functions which were implemented in v 2.2 and describe how they can be used to make a job board site more popular and successful. To see the full list of features, improvements and bug fixes, please take a look at our change log. To see v 2.2 in action please go to our live demo section.

Mass mailing system

Mass mailing allows sending newsletters with different promotion campaigns to attract site users visit it again. The “without listings” option is also useful if you want to send a reminder about your services to registered users who haven’t posted any jobs or resumes yet. This should encourage users to visit your site more often and make postings if they don’t have any.

Ability to create custom XML feeds via Admin Panel

There are Indeed and SimplyHired standard feeds included.
This allows you to boost your site traffic by exporting job postings to job search sites such as Indeed or SimplyHired. You only need to submit your feed to these sites and people will find jobs from your site among search results.

XML import function

Automatically fill your site with job postings by importing them from other job sites which provide XML feeds. E.g. Indeed and SimplyHired provide their jobs data in XML feeds for publishers. Thus to be able to import jobs from these site - you only need to become their publisher. You can also import jobs (or resumes) directly from companies’ or recruiters sites by creating custom XML data sources for these sites.

Job and Resume postings approval by site administrator

Eliminate unwanted and scam postings from your site by approving them first. Users will be notified by email about their postings being approved or rejected.

There are many new great functions already included to our road map. So we’re really excited about starting to work on the next release. If anyone have suggestions about new features or improvements feel free to leave a comment here or contact us.

SalesProRecruitment.co.uk is a sales professionals’ niche job board that has been launched in UK this week. Site is dedicated to recruitment in sales industry and targeted to the UK region.

Being built on SmartJobBoard version 2.1 the site provides many useful functions for sales recruiters and job seekers.

Video profile for recruiters and video CV for job seekers is one of the main features offered by SalesProRecruitment.co.uk. Using it candidates are able to present themselves visually saving time and money as well as speeding up the recruitment process. Recruiting companies or direct employers are able to post a video showing why candidates should work for their organisation.

SmartJobBoard, announcing the release of the new version 2.1 of its job board software. Release includes lots of new useful functions, bugs fixed, and performance optimization. Most important features to be outlined are: applications history and management for job seekers and employers, anonymous resumes, multi select lists, dashboard in admin panel and much more.

After releasing the first version in August SmartJobBoard has been successfully used by a number of online entrepreneurs to launch their job board sites. The software has showed itself as a reliable solution for running job sites for different niches and business models. This experience was considered working on a new version.

“We’ve made a big step to correspond to our customers’ requests. We’ve been carefully considering their needs, and did our best to implement this within our new version” says Rodion Telpizov SmartJobBoard CEO. “As a result the software became more robust, efficient and easy to customize without much technical knowledge.”

SmartJobBoard is looking forward to develop the best solution for job board web sites, by constantly improving its software and including new functions based on customers’ experience. One of the main plans for the nearest future is launching hosted version on the per month pricing basis. This will allow clients who don’t have their own hosting and technical staff to use SmartJobBoard solution.

There are lots of discussions over the web about SEO, its advantages and practices. In this article I’d like to share my experience, I’ve got during customizing job board software for my clients, in using SEO specifically for job sites.
Search engine optimization is one of the most important issues taken into attention when promoting job board sites. It allows job seeker to find relevant job postings on your job site via search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and etc. For example when job seeker searches for a “quality assurance specialist” in Google, quality assurance jobs from your site will be in top results if you’ve made right optimization of your job board.  That will benefit you in getting relevant traffic to your career site from search engines.
Below I’ve listed basic tips and tricks you can use to take top positions in organic search results.

Browsing

First of all search engines should be able to easily index all job posting on your site. In other words there should be an ability on your site to browse any job posting by simply clicking on a few links. A good example of browsing function you can see on many job sites is a “Browse jobs by location”. This function displays a list of locations with links to separate pages for each location with a list of jobs within that location.
It will give your site SEO advantage since all that location pages will be indexed by search engines, and job seekers will be able to find them when searching jobs in a particular location.
For example search in Google by “jobs in Georgia” gave me the following results: http://www.google.com/search?q=jobs+in+georgia
Among these results you can see links to pages with jobs in Georgia on popular job boards that have browse by location functionality.

So here is the list of SEO suggestion you can use when optimizing your Browse by location pages:

1. Each location page should include location name in the Title of that page. E.g. “Jobs in Georgia”.
2. URL of each location page should include this location name in it. E.g. http://georgia.jobs.com/ or http://www.smartjobboard.com/demo/browse_by_city/Raleigh/

You can also add other browse functions such as “Browse by job category” and etc. A good example if different browsing functions could be found on Indeed.com (Browse by Job Title, Company, State, and Category).
To make sure your job postings are indexed by search engine you can make a search by job posting URL on your site (e.g. http://www.smartjobboard.com/demo/display_job/25/Quality_Assurance_Specialist.html). And if you can see your page in search results, search engine has successfully indexed your job postings.

Job Details Page Optimization

Now when search engines are able to index all your job postings, it’s time to optimize job details page. It should improve the position of this page in search results by relevant keywords.

First of all include relevant keywords (by which you’d like your posting to be found in search engines) to the title of that page. In most cases these keywords consist of job title. But you can also include location or any other information you find relevant to job postings on your site (e.g. job category, company name and etc.).

It would be also useful to include these keywords to the page URL e.g. http://www.smartjobboard.com/demo/display_job/25/Quality_Assurance_Specialist.html. Google takes into attention page URLs and this will give you additional advantages.
Adding job posting info to the Keywords and Description meta tags will also be useful but not necessary. Google doesn’t use Keywords tags info, but some other search engines do, so it will do no harm in any case.

Keep in mind that all described above is for optimizing content of your job site only. This will help search engines to determine the relevance of job postings content to the keywords that job seekers will use in their searches. But you should also have a high page rank of your site to be in the top results. You can read more about getting higher page rank here.

These are the basic steps to make your job postings appear in search results in top positions. Hope these advices will be helpful. If anyone has anything to add fell free to post your comments.

Working in the online recruitment industry, I’m often amazed with the variety of ways job site owners charge the users of their service. My company produces software packages for building job board sites, and we configure these different charging plans for our clients. The first thing that I noticed is that there was no standard business model that job site owner choose. Everyone is trying to use unique model, and it rarely repeats. There are many payment options and variations that can be payable.
So here I’d like to describe some of the most interesting charging models I’ve seen. This is based on my own experience, and on the employment sites I’ve seen on the Internet.

1. Employer pays for a number of resume views – This is the most popular model and also used on many popular job sites.
2. Job seeker pays for making his resume viewable to employers free of charge. This means that when posting a resume, the job seeker has two options. First option is free for job seeker, but employer will have to pay to view job seeker resume. Second option is payable for job seeker, and employer wont have to pay to view the resume.
3. Employer pays for a number of resume views during a particular period of time. E.g. viewing 20 resumes per week.
4. Job seekers pay to hide their contact information. Employers are able to contact them only through the web site. This is useful when the job seeker want to be anonymous for some reason, but still needs to communicate with potential employers.
5. Job seekers pay to possibly include additional information to their resumes, such as enhanced skills description, pictures or videos.
6. Employer pays for unlimited job posting for a particular period of time.

So if anyone has any additions to my list feel free to post it in the comments. I am always interested in learning about new models for charging.

Generally speaking, when it comes to any software solution for Web business, we often ask ourselves: what is the best option? There are so many offers, which one should you choose? Moreover, building an online job board requires much effort today, since the market is heavily competitive. So you, as a site owner, should offer something unique to your online recruitment service users.

You know who never asks this question? Developers who can make there own software. Since we are not developers we become dependent on those them and we have to choose whom to trust. The choices now are to either to buy the ready-made job board script, or pay somebody to make a solution especially for you.

There are a lot of discussions on the Web about this topic, but let’s just take a look at all the “pros and cons” of each option and come up with an answer to your questions.

Personalized Solution

There are lots of freelance companies over the Internet, which will create any functions you need for your job board site. To find those companies or individual freelancers you can use special freelance web sites, where you can post your project description and get bids from freelancers. Here is a list of the most popular freelance sites:
www.elance.com, www.getafreelancer.com, www.guru.com, www.scriptlance.com
Pros:

• Personalization: With individual solutions you will get exactly what you need (ideally). You will have a piece of software designed specially for your career website with consideration for your business model. As a result you’ll get the job site with unique features, which no one has.

Cons:

• Time-consuming: If you want a personal job board script you will need to be patient, because it will take much longer than just filling out the payment form for a ready-made script. Moreover, you are lucky if you can find a team which is able to work within your deadlines. In many cases developers fail to meet the deadlines explaining it with some unforeseen technical problems arisen during the development process which, of course, you cannot verify because you do not understand the development process.
• Expensive: Completely personalized scripts might take too long to complete and, as you know, a developer’s time costs a lot. Usually the price is measured with the number of people involved in the project and the number of hours to be spent on it. So, if you want a really personalized solution, you’ll pay much more then expected.

Ready-Made Solution

Today there is a huge choice of software solutions for a job board web site. Here is a list of the most popular scripts:
www.smartjobboard.com, www.jamit.com, www.jobbex.com, www.joblite.co.uk
Pros:

• Relatively cheap: Absolutely true, because the script is made once and then it’s being sold to as many people as possible. They don’t have to spend time and effort every time they want to sell the software, they just sell a copy of what they’ve already made.
• Everything included: The good side of this is that you get all the basic features you need based on the customers feedback (otherwise they wouldn’t sell many copies). You can be sure most of your needs will be met because many customers have already requested the existing features.
• Updates. Ready-made scripts are also good for those who are used to keeping their ear to the ground. In order to stay ahead of their competition, ready-made job board scripts are constantly being updated based on feedback from their customers, the news and the latest trends.
• Community support: Last, but not least, community is a big help whenever you are confused about something about a product (let’s be realistic, many things can happen). A group of people with similar issues are often ready to help with advice or in some cases provide technical support.

Cons:

• No personalization: You get the same job board script as all other customers of this company, which means at that in the beginning you have no competitive edge, other than your ideas. If you need some expanded features you have to ask for the original developer’s help.
• Unnecessary features: With all the benefits you get, you can often get a lot of unnecessary features. Companies do their best to satisfy their customer’s needs, but we are all different, so that’s why the only way to satisfy all of their customers is to offer all they can. That’s what they do: all possible features are included by default, which can make the script difficult to manage and even to use, and often bloated in size. Again, without developers, you will not be able to get rid off unnecessary items.

Looking at all Pros and Cons of both solutions, it’s difficult to choose one and go for it. Ideally, you should choose something that combines all the “pros” of these two choices and this will be the right solution. Is this possible? Yes, with some products like www.smartjobboard.com, which are offered as a ready-made job site script, but allow for custom modifications. There are not many companies offering this kind of flexibility, and even less that provide both at high quality. Professionals who can do this are priceless. In case you don’t find one, you should go for a ready-made solution as it seems that this option has more convincing “pros” in comparison to personalized job board scripts.